Paul Graham Quotes

Founders often wonder whether they should raise money from investors. The answer to that one is surprisingly simple. You should raise money if and only if you (a) need money and (b) are currently appealing enough to get it.

At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects, and parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't.

When I finished the first draft of an essay in high school, I'd scan through it hoping it was long enough. Now when I finish a first draft I scroll through it hoping it's not too long.

Swag is no good if no one uses it, so put that before cost or branding. The reason YC t-shirts are gray instead of orange is simply that the gray shirts were softer.

You don't need to know more than the most obvious things about business to start a startup, but you need to be at least decent at building things, in order to build sufficiently good initial versions.

Liberal education is a luxury product that the conventional wisdom mistakenly believes to be more utilitarian than it is as a result of the clumsy hiring practices of big companies.

It might not be a bad policy to ask every couple months "what is the most community noted account remaining?" and ban it.

If you're running a process that people want to hack, and you're not actively measuring attempts to hack it, it's being hacked.

The most important component of writing clearly is simply to have high standards for clarity. Then if you write something unclear, you notice, and ask: what did I mean to say? You can just keep doing this over and over. And if you have high standards for clarity, you will.

When people criticize an action on the grounds of the "optics," they're almost always full of shit. All they're really saying is "What you did looks bad." But if they phrased it that way, they'd have to answer the question "Was it actually bad, or not?"

The artist who occupies the most space in my brain is Stanley Badmin. Almost every day I look at the world and think "Badmin."

I worry that between now and full self-driving there will be an intermediate stage in which the human driver is the slave of the car.

When people say that technology can't help prevent climate change, it's either a profession of faith or a prediction about the future of technology. And since no one can predict the future of technology, it's basically always a profession of faith.

It's exhausting to be lied to. I think some of the most accomplished liars even take advantage of this fact. Their lies then serve a double purpose: (a) whatever purpose each specific lie serves and (b) to exhaust their audience and thereby batter them into submission.

the probability of being able to "beat the system" increases when the system is inconsistent or corrupt.